First we had Howard Dean with his primal scream of desperation.  Now we have the entire Vermont legislature, a bit ago, calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and just today (Friday, April 20, 2007) calling for the impeachment of President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

I wonder what the population percentage of GWI (Global Warming Industry) and GCI (Gun Control Industry) psychopaths is in The People’s Republic of Vermont.  I’m assuming it’s fairly exponential.

If you’re of sound mind, be afraid, be very afraid, of anything coming out of Vermont.

In wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, where a lone looney slaughtered 32 people and then took his own deranged life, look for the Gun Control industry (GCI) to rev up its engines and pounce on what it perceives as a grand opportunity to eradicate or castrate the Second Amendment.

Most of these GCI people are the same ones who would like to dictate to everyone how he or she should live–which doctor one can see under nationalized medicine, etc. (hi, Hillary).  They’s akin to the Global Warming Industry (GWI) advocates who want to tax the industrialized world into submission while they buy bogus "carbon offsets" (often from Al Gore) to keep on burning fuel to warm their mansions while the rest of us recede into caves.

Anyway, the clatter has already started.  Whenever children or young people are involved, these people really get their righteous indignation up, as if using guns were the only way to kill young innocents, or old ones for that matter.  Let’s see:  Al Qaeda terrorists used our own airplanes.  More at home:  In 1927 an American named Andrew Kehoe blew up 45 schoolchildren using homemade bombs.  Timothy McVeigh used fertilizer.  There’s no end to ways to murder, but guns are a convenient target because they’re, well, "so beneath" the elites who want to strip us of our right to defend ourselves while they live in walled castles with bodyguards.

Middle Ages, here we come if these GCI (and GWI) people have their way.

By Peter Zeihan
Courtesy of Strategic Forecasing

Russian opposition members rallied in Moscow’s Pushkin Square on April 14. The so-called Dissenters’ March was organized by Other Russia, an umbrella group that includes everyone from unrepentant communists and free-market reformers to far-right ultranationalists whose only uniting characteristic is their common opposition to the centralization of power under President Vladimir Putin’s administration.

Minutes after the march began, the 2,000 or so protesters found themselves outnumbered more than four to one by security forces. They quickly dispersed the activists, beating and briefly detaining those who sought to break through the riot-control lines. Among those arrested were chess-champion-turned-political-activist Garry Kasparov and Maria Gaidar, the daughter of Russia’s first post-Soviet reformist prime minister. Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov only avoided arrest because his bodyguards helped him to escape. A Reuters crew was permitted to capture the events and disseminate them to the West. A day later, another protest, albeit far smaller, was broken up in a similar way in St. Petersburg, though Kasparov was detained before the protest even began.

What gives?

John McCain is beginning to remind me of Ted Kennedy in 1980.  Kennedy gave his best impassioned appeal for liberalism in his presidential primary campaign against Jimmy Carter, but to no avail.  Likewise, McCain is now making his best impassioned appeal for victory in Iraq, but it may not be enough to save his candidacy in what is basically a three-way race for the Republican presidential nomination, Fred Thompson being the wild card whose hat is not yet in the ring.

McCain, of course, tarnished himself in his earlier Senate days as one of the Keating Five, but he’s basically an honorable man.  We cannot say the same of Kennedy, who probably doesn’t have an honorable bone in his body.  Nonetheless, the two will probably end up sharing the same fate as tragic and unsuccessful advocates of passionate causes.

But who’s the Ronald Reagan parallel in all this, Fred Thompson or Barack Obama?

Sometimes I think the world was better off in the heyday of the Cold War, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union patrolled their respective spheres of the world and kept everyone mostly at bay, except for a few Soviet client wars here and there and a few police actions by the U.S.

I bring this up because, for one thing, today is the 60th anniversary of the coining of the term Cold War by Bernard M. Baruch in a speech at the South Carolina Statehouse, and also because of the recent surge of terrorism in response to Bush’s surge in Baghdad-based troops.

Terrorists were pretty much less a threat and confined mostly to activities on Israelis before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.  All hell broke loose after that as Osama bin Laden and others, backed by U.S. military supplies, forged a resistance movement.  When the Soviets departed, the next generation of global terrorists had been born, nurtured by combat, and mobilized by bin Laden.

Flash forward to Sept. 11, 2001, and you see the consequences.

However, there’s no way to turn back the hands of time to pre-1979 realities, so we live in the proverbial brave new world of complete uncertainty.  If you think the native American culture wars between the religious right and the secularists are difficult to navigate, you ain’t seen nothing yet compared to the emerging (nay, continuing) hot culture war between Islamists and the rest of us.

Now, I don’t agree with what Don Imus said that ultimately led to his sacking by CBS.  In fact, I never even listened to the guy because his bullying, foul-mouthed tactics are not my cup of tea.  However, millions of people did listen to him, and now he’s been silenced.

Why?

One has to wonder just how poor is North Korea when it’s so desperate to recover $25 million frozen in a Macau bank at the behest of the Bush Administration.

The communist country has even mortgaged its agreement to stop its nuclear production to the return of these funds, which evidently are now on their way.

The bigger question, of course:  Will the North now honor its nuclear commitment?

My guess is "yes and no."  Officials will cease development enough to make it look good while always holding the nuclear option as their trump card, much as Iran as now playing its bullying nuke-’em trump card.